Amlogic S905 vs Amlogic S912 Benchmarks Comparison

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The comparison table below contains scores for Antutu 6.x, Vellamo 3.x, and 3DMark Ice Storm Extreme. MINI NEO U1 runs Android 5.1, while M12N runs Android 6.0, so once/if MINIX NEO U1 gets an Android 6.0 results may differ, likely improve a little bit. It’s also possible Android 6.0 SDK is not that mature, and over time, Amlogic S912 results may improve somewhat too, but nevertheless the results give an overview of the performance that you can expect from devices today (September 2016). Results in green means Amlogic S912 is faster.

	Amlogic S905	Amlogic S912	Ratio
CPU*	Quad core Cortex A53 @ 1.536 GHz	Quad core Cortex A53 @ 1.536 GHz + Quad core Cortex A53 @ 1.0 GHz
GPU	Penta-core ARM Mali-450MP	ARM Mali-T820MP3
Antutu 6.x
Overall	38,032	41,303	1.09
3D (1920×1080)	3,979	8,782	2.21
UX	15,690	14,902	0.95
CPU	13,458	13,418	1.00
RAM	4,905	4,201	0.86
Vellamo 3.x
Metal	1,235	1,052	0.85
Multicore	1,589	1,422**	0.89
Browser	2,157	2,758	1.28
3DMark – Ice Storm Extreme v1.2
Total score	4,327	5,752	1.33
Graphics score	3,698	5,304	1.43
Physics score	10,689	8,163	0.76

* CPU-Z and other tools will report 2.02 GHz for both processor, since it’s what’s reported by the kernel, but the actual frequency should be limited to 1.536 GHz, although it might be possible to run up the clock to 1.65 GHz with a firmware change. Amlogic S912 is an octa-core processor using big.LITTLE processing, and the LITTLE cores are clocked at 1.0 GHz according to the values returned by the kernel.
** M12N firmware had a problem to complete one of the Multicore tests, so instead I used the results from Qintaix Q912 since all tests passed, and should be more relevant to the actual performance of Amlogic S912.
So overall, there’s very little performance difference between Amlogic S905 and Amlogic S912, except for 3D graphics where the Mali-T820MP3 GPU used in S912 has a slightly edge over the penta-core Mali-450MP used in S905, with performance improvements up to 1.43x in 3DMark Ice Storm Extreme graphics score. The Antutu 3D score is 2.21 times higher, but it’s because Mali-T820MP3 supports OpenGL ES 3.1, and Mali-450MP does not.
They are however other advantages of Amlogic S912 over Amlogic S905 TV Boxes including Android 6.0 firmware by default, 4K VP9 hardware decoding, and HDR (High Dynamic Range support). Now, if you don’t care about the last three, there are very little incentives to upgrade from Amlogic S905 to Amlogic S912, and if you don’t own a TV box yet, buying an Amlogic S905 TV box would offer a better price to performance ratio, all other specs being equal.